February 21, 1999

By SIMON BLACKBURN

WHAT WE OWE TO EACH OTHER
By T. M. Scanlon. 420 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $35.

here are moral philosophers who are famous for the depth and weight of their treatises, and there are those who are remembered more for a single formula, such as Kant's
''Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law.'' In practice, however, philosophers of the second kind usually need to write at least as much as those of the
first kind, just to explain what their formula means. T. M. Scanlon of Harvard University is no exception. He has long had a formula embodying an approach to morality that makes it the offspring of a kind of social contract. And now, 18
years after finding the formula, he has a whole treatise -- ''What We Owe to Each Other.''

Scanlon's formula is not quite as pithy as Kant's. As succinct a version as any occurs on page 153: ''An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation
of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement.'' This is no bumper sticker. The two negatives and the circumspect clauses foreshadow the need for interpretations, distinctions
and defenses, and this is what they get.

The idea that principles of right action, or right government, are those that we could expect reasonable people to agree on is of course neither new nor uncommon. It lies in the same corner of logical space as the golden rule: Do as you would be done
by. And anything shared by Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill and R. M. Hare must have something right about it. More immediately, a version of it lies at the heart of the 1971 classic of which this book is
a direct descendant, ''A Theory of Justice,'' by John Rawls.

Rawls tried to identify the principles of a just society as those it would be rational to contract into. He confronted the problem that the people who make real contracts are people who have divergent concerns and agendas, as well as asymmetries of needs
and powers and wealth. Famously, to defend against the way these forces create unjust contracts and principles, he imposed a ''veil of ignorance,'' asking us to imagine that we are contracting into general principles
in ignorance of our own particular properties and circumstances. Scanlon does without the veil of ignorance by relying on two ideas. First, his contractors are motivated by a common concern to find the principles he talks of (they
are not, for instance, motivated solely by desire for local competitive advantage). And second, his talk of reasonable rejection, in the formula I quoted above, invokes a conception of universal, shared reasons, so that what is a reason
for one is to be a reason for all.

Critics of Rawls quickly pointed out that once individual differences are bleached out by the veil of ignorance, we are not really relying on the idea of a contract as much as on an idea of rational choice. Rawls's arrangements for society become
simply ones that, supposedly, it would be rational to choose if you did not know which niche in society you were going to occupy. The contractual element becomes effaced. A similar problem dogs Scanlon's version. Once people's
actual differences are submerged beneath their concern to find general principles, and once their reasons become not reasons from within one perspective or another but universal, then the formula begins to look rather different. In
fact, it begins to look something like ''An action is wrong if principles allowing it could reasonably be rejected.'' It sounds a bit like ''Try not to act so that people have a complaint against you''
-- which seems less than electrifying.

But the role of contract diminishes further if we turn our attention to those reasons for rejection. Why not suppose that they themselves provide the very reasons an action is wrong, short-circuiting any residual appeal to contracts with others? Suppose
it is reasonable to reject my principles because, for instance, they lead to vast inequalities of wealth. Why then isn't that the very feature that makes my principles wrong? Why go through the detour of dragging in the hypothetical
agreement with others?

The question becomes particularly pointed when we think of actions that are supposed to be wrong although the harm is done to a creature or even a thing that is incapable of making contracts: aborting a fetus, tormenting animals or flooding the Grand
Canyon for water-skiing. About this last kind of case Scanlon admits that ''the idea that there is a moral objection to harming or defacing works of nature (apart from any effects this has on human life) is adequately explained
by the fact that the character of these objects -- such as their grandeur, beauty and complexity -- provides compelling reason not to harm them. Nothing would be added by bringing in the idea of what a trustee for these objects would
have reason to reject.'' But then one might suppose that the character of other things we care about -- such as misery, pain or death -- provides compelling moral reasons as well, just by itself.

Scanlon valiantly faces questions like these, and valiantly tries to answer them. His discussions are deep and honest, and they illuminate many key concepts of moral philosophy: well-being, trust, friendship, loyalty, promises. It would be -- and will
be -- the business of more than one doctoral thesis to assess his success (students will not, however, be helped by Harvard University Press's having put important notes at the end of the book instead of on the page, a minuscule
saving given modern typesetting technique).

The book bears witness to a different element in contemporary moral philosophy, and perhaps one of more general cultural significance. Suppose we ask further about the reasons upon which everything hinges. For Scanlon, believing that something provides
a reason for action is having a belief, capable of truth or falsity. But this kind of belief is not about ordinary fact. It is not ''about the natural world.'' Belief about these unnatural facts occupies a central
role in his moral psychology: such things as emotions, passions and desires, by contrast, are either absorbed into such beliefs or heavily belittled.

Now, when some feature of things weighs with people in their deliberations, we can say that they see it as a reason for or against a course of action. But which side of the equation explains the other? Does the weight come first and explain what is meant
by seeing something as a reason? On that side lie philosophers like Hume and St. Augustine, who wrote that ''in the pull of the will and of love appears the worth of everything to be sought or avoided, to be thought of greater
or less value.'' On the other side lie philosophers owing allegiance to Plato, Aristotle and sometimes Kant. They hold that our passionate natures come entirely under the control of truth and reason. Apollo rules Dionysus.
The trouble with this sunny picture is that Apollo's control is unintelligible, for beliefs that are not about the natural world are eminently dispensable. Why should we care about anything they supposedly represent? And if we
did, wouldn't this care itself be an intrusion from the dark, a present from Dionysus? On St. Augustine's side there is no difficulty: we talk of reasons to reflect the fact that we already care.

It is a matter of great cultural interest that so many analytic philosophers, including Scanlon, are bemused by the Apollonian vision. I suspect many think that their role as Guardians of the Norms requires it. Desires and passions are to have no role
in the government; they are only there to be governed. I find this belief sad and puzzling at the same time. After all, St. Augustine can be as fierce a defender of the norms that matter as anybody. Scanlon himself sometimes comes
close to realizing that he does not really need the Apollonian image. We can still do moral philosophy if we recognize that many of our concerns have passion and desire as their ancestors rather than truth and reason. But at other
points panic sets in. Early in the book, for example, Scanlon surmises that Hume ''may have held'' the view that nothing ever counts in favor of any action or intention at all. At first sight this deserves some
kind of prize, even in the highly competitive field of traducing Hume. It is only explicable if we allow Scanlon to impose the view that reasons that are seen only in the pull of the will and of love are not real reasons at all. But
when we reflect what a cold picture of human nature that implies, I think we should find it rather sad.

Simon Blackburn, the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, is the author of ''The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'' and ''Ruling Passions.''